Private Lives, Public Deaths : : Antigone and the Invention of Individuality / / Jonathan Strauss.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Strauss, Jonathan,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.) :; 1 Illustration, black and white

In Private Lives, Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone crystallized the political, intellectual, and aesthetic forces of an entire historical moment—fifth century Athens—into one idea: the value of a single living person. That idea existed, however, only as a powerful but unconscious desire. Drawing on classical studies, Hegel, and contemporary philosophical interpretations of this pivotal drama, Strauss argues that Antigone’s tragedy, and perhaps all classical tragedy, represents a failure to satisfy this longing. To the extent that the value of a living individual remains an open question, what Sophocles attempted to imagine still escapes our understanding. Antigone is, in this sense, a text not from the past but from our future.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Greek Transliterations -- Introduction: Tragedy, the City, and Its Dead -- 1. Two Orders of Individuality -- 2. The Citizen -- 3. Loss Embodied -- 4. States of Exclusion -- 5. Inventing Life -- 6. Mourning, Longing, Loving -- 7. Exit Tragedy -- Appendix A: Summary of Sophocles’s Labdacid Cycle -- Appendix B: Timeline of Relevant Events in Ancient Greece -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index